And what about wet underwear?

Written byAlison McCook

| 1 min read

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I absolutely cannot resist blogging about this - the web site "Oddee," which linkurl:describes itself;http://www.oddee.com/item_90683.aspx as a "blog on the oddities of our world," has listed the 10 most bizarre scientific papers. Obviously, some experiments make the list that could be termed "life science" - including, for example, a 1992 analysis of the linkurl:effect of country music;http://www.uta.edu/depken/ugrad/3318/music-suicide.pdf on suicide rates, detailed calculations of the physics of how penguins linkurl:poo;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/53069/, and how linkurl:wet underwear;http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=7925261&ordinalpos=4&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum affects thermoregulatory responses. The list also includes a study about MRI analyses of taxi drivers' brains, which showed their posterior hippocampi (suspected to be involved in navigation) were larger than controls', the volume changing proportionate to the time they spent as a driver. (This is actually an interesting field - plug "hippocampus taxi driver" into PubMed, and you'll see some other research on the topic.) It might be depressing to know how much public funds were spent on the dubious projects on this list. For now, they're just plain funny.

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